ABSTRACT
A growing population, reduced cultivable landmass, and shifting consumer preferences coupled with weather vagaries are some of the emerging challenges confronting the sustainable cultivation of pharmaceutically important horticultural crops. Micropropagation of fruit crops has become crucial for providing quality plants to meet nutritional security and pharmaceutical needs. Micropropagation facilitates the rapid bulking up of plants in small spaces, making it a cost-effective process; it is also used to increase the vitality and yield of fruit crops. The fruit crops which we have covered in this chapter are primarily grown in the tropics and subtropics of the world, such as mango (Mangifera indica L), guava (Psidium guajava L), aonla (Emblica officinalis Gaertn), bael (Aegle marmelos Correa), jamun (Syzygium cumini Skeel), papaya (Carica papaya L) and banana (Musa spp). Except for banana and papaya, all other fruit crops are woody perennials which are recalcitrant species for tissue culture. However, efforts have been made to micropropagate these woody perennials with varying degrees of success. Repetitive somatic embryogenesis protocols are available for mango, papaya and guava (Mishra et al., 2007, 2010; Kamle et al., 2014). However, somatic embryogenesis protocols of papaya and guava need to be upscaled prior to its commercialization. Somatic embryo-driven tissue-cultured plants of mango could not be established in the field due to a poor vascular combination between root and shoot (Kidwai, 2006). A guava micropropagation protocol from the nodal shoot is available and can be exploited commercially. Protocols for shoot bud-mediated micropropagation of aonla (Mishra et al., 2006), bael (Mishra et al., 2006), and jamun (Raju and Divya, 2020) are already in place and need to be upscaled before exploitation. Banana is the most commercially used tissue culture product across the globe. However, micropropagation through bioreactors is the way forward for tissue culture industries.
